Why have lots of prank calls to emergency services when a keylock that's supposed to lock the keys - it's primary function - doesn't work?
As mentioned, pressing *any key on the phone* except zero gives a highly informative display of "press unlock", with a big animated arrow pointing to the unlock button, and then once you've pressed that, "press *".
If it's your phone, the odds that you will be dialing and you will know pretty well how to unlock said phone. If it's not your phone - to be honest, 10 seconds in getting emergency services doesn't count that much. In reality if the situation is that serious and you're the only one there, you should be busy giving first aid, ensuring someone's breathing, stopping bleeding or whatever, before you find the time to call emergency services. And if you're not alone, then the time you spend giving first aid more than compensates for the time it takes for another person with you to unlock an unfamiliar phone.
My old Nokia 3310 has a keylock.... that lets you dial the emergency number through it. The emergency number here is "000" - there were quite a few times where I'd pull my phone out of my pocket to be greeted with "000" and "send" all ready to go. Seeing that the send button's the biggest one on the phone, I'm amazed I didn't get more irate calls from emergency services. Any other key except 0 would give you the little animation of how to unlock the phone, so if there was an accident most people could figure it out, you'd think.
Here's a hint for the Nokia UI engineers: Keylocks should lock the keys. That is all. Don't add any unexpected overrides in there.
A few comments on the differences between here and there -
She can make calls from anywhere in the US, to anywhere in the US, for no additional charge. Ditto here, sort of. That is, mobile to landline calls cost the same anywhere in Australia.
...we get a hugely flexible system. A GSM phone from the UK may operate in Greece, but not for the same price as if you were sitting in London. True, but that's more of an inter-country thing there and it actually showcases the flexibility of the GSM network in general. Do your phones play nicely with other countries when you're overseas?
We're crippled somewhat in Australia due to low population density and - well , low population in general. I drive on a weekly basis a trip that's 900km long one way (9 hours drive at the speed limit) - there would perhaps be 20,000 people , tops , that live along that route. Yet I can get coverage for 90% of the trip along it. That kind of coverage, with our kind of sparse population costs money.
This is the odd thing about the US mobile phone system that I can never figure out.
Here, in Australia, there's no such thing as being charged to receive a call on your mobile. The caller pays the charges to connect to you, with all mobile numbers having an obvious prefix (04) that gives the caller an indication that this will cost them more than a normal PSTN call. So, I have a prepaid phone sim lying around here that has 12 months of access on it, and currently has $2 credit. People can call me that entire 12 months and it doesn't cost me anything.
For "normal" use, I have a phone plan for $35/mo that gives me untimed calls to any landline and Telstra mobile number in Australia for 35 cents, with other telco's mobiles the rate is 35c/min. I have my wife's phone on the same account with the same plan for her, and calls between us are free and untimed. Even, for some reason, 3G video calls, which I thought were supposed to be charged at the 35c/min rate..... but I'm not about to mention that to Telstra now:-P. Now , that plan's a good rate for a user who makes a relatively small number of calls , but talks for a long time - tech support is a good fit for this plan. But there's a plethora of phone plans out there that all have the same basic tenet - your access to the network is (mostly) free, and you pay to make calls, and that's it.
All this US business with "minutes" and crap just seems weird. Can someone explain it in detail for the foreigners?
In extremely brief terms, Kant postulated that space and time, rather than being entities in their own right are characteristics of our 'minds,' (my oversimplification, not Kant's), and that the only way we can understand the universe is in spatiotemporal terms regardless of what the universe might actually be 'like'. In other words, it's conceivable that the universe is not spatio-temporal per-se--and if it's not, then physics cannot provide an exhaustive description of it.
That would be plastic. Go have a look at the Reva sometime. Small electric car, mostly plastic panels over a minimal steel subframe. Whether it stands up to acceptable crashworthiness standards is anyones guess, however they are relatively low speed vehicles.
Eugene Shoemaker wound up with some of his ashes on the Lunar Prospector spacecraft, which eventually flown into the moon. He was the guy who co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which eventually smacked into Jupiter.
While I don't condone his actions in the past (that is, using/. to push more views to his site for personal gain), he doesn't link-through his site anymore. So now, he's just another submitter of crappy stories that generally give off wildly over-optimistic expectations of future possibilities.
It doesn't look *that* suspicious. It just looks like you haven't filled it yet. To maintain plausibility, the outer truecrypt layer will happily hose the hidden volume without warning if you fill the outer layer up.
You can just say, "yeah, I had a play around with TrueCrypt when I was feeling a little paranoid one day, but I never really use it."
I now have a job that : - Does 12 hour shifts, with 4 days on, 4 days off, 4 nights on, 4 days off,etc. - Six weeks a year of holidays. With the 4 days off every 4 days, I seriously have trouble using them all up. - 5 days a year paid sick leave. - Pays more than twice the national average (AUD105,000)
And the best part of it?
I go home after my shift, and no-one calls. Ever. I laze about on my days off and I don't get asked to do overtime. Ever.
Why?
Because there is SOMEBODY ELSE TO DO THE WORK WHEN I'M NOT THERE.
It's the best part of the job. The simple pleasure of handing ongoing work off to another person so you can have a break is great. It might get handed back to you tommorrow, or when you come back 4 days later, but again, you get a break from it and the work gets passed along until it's finally complete.
Yes, yes, so you (not personally you, parent poster) are a big tough man and can hack it and the rest of them are pussies. Thing is, you don't need to. Get some decent conditions. Someone up further mentioned unions. This is where you need one - so you don't get exploited like this, and you are being exploited. Women seem to have it figured out. Just about every other industry figured it out nearly a century ago. How long will it be before people in IT realise it?
The IT industry really needs to sort its shit out.
Sooooooo.... what happens when two companies pay the $10000+ to ReputationDefender and have opposing viewpoints?
RD salesman, to client #1: "Yes, that slanderous party are a tenacious bunch, aren't they? I can sign you up for our premium DefenderPack, it's another $20000.... but what's your reputation worth? You will? Ok, we'll start straight away and do our best."
RD salesman, to client #2: "Yes, that slanderous party are a tenacious bunch, aren't they? I can sign you up for our premium DefenderPack, it's another $20000.... but what's your reputation worth? You will? Ok, we'll start straight away and do our best."
RD salesman, to rest of team: "Is anyone actually doing anything for clients 1 and 2? No? Good. Keep it that way."
I'm not an encryption/stenography expert, so I have to trust others. But reading the description of TrueCrypt's hidden volume indicates that it's pretty hard to tell if anything's there without the key.
Free/slack space calculations are not an issue - the main volume will happily trash the hidden one if you overfill it. You can prevent this only if you know the passwords to both volumes.
In my car, I have a number of buttons and knobs, some on the dash, on the steering column, on the wheel itself. Each one can be operated without looking at it and each one does some specific function. Indeed, the most useful buttons on the stereo can be used even on the most potholed streets by putting your hand on the gearstick and using your index finger without drama.
But a display-that-changes-with-knob is a solution that is also a problem: The display changes, allowing more controls to occupy the same space. Good, for getting more functionality, bad for having to navigate through it all.
So, I want to access some function. I need to :
- Look at the screen and determine "where I am" in the menu system. - I have to navigate to the selection I want, from where I was before. This may involve going up a few menu layers and then back down. - Which takes a varying amount of rotation/clicks/whatever, depending on where I was. Each step generally requires visual confirmation that you're actually heading in the right direction to get where you want to be in the system.
Every time I do this, I am temporarily distracted from my main task, which is driving the car safely.
A guy gets invited to a hunting lodge one evening, and on his arrival, everyone is having a few beers and taking it easy. Suddenly, one of them stands up and says, "27". Everyone has a bit of a laugh and they clap appreciatively. Another person stands and says, "48." Again this is met with laughter and a few guffaws.
The visitor is perplexed and asks his host, "What's going on here?" His host replies, "Oh, these guys have known each other for years, so long now that they know all their jokes. So, to save time , they numbered them." "Oh!" the visitor says. "Did you want to have a try at it?" says the host.
With much trepidation, the visitor stands up and says, "96."
Well, it brought the house down. Grizzled old men are rolling about, clutching their sides laughing, gasping for breath. This goes on for nearly ten minutes.
"Wow! They really liked that one!" says the visitor. "I'll say!" said the host, wiping a tear from his eye, "They hadn't heard that one before!"
But I am in HISTERICAL URGE to get one... $300 is really cheap for a PC with STUNNING FORM/FACTOR.......So actually I'am quite MOIST thinking about this hardware.
Unless you can assure that there are no vapors (very difficult in practice), you run the risk of lighting the gas (and yourself) on fire. Don't do it.
Actually, you need as much vapor as possible - it displaces the air (and oxygen) leaving you with a non-combustible mix. For petrol-air concentrations below 1.4%, the mixture is too lean to ignite, and for those above 7.6% too rich; at all concentrations between these two limits, a mixture of petrol vapour and air will burn.
There's 119 posts on that thread. It's a trail of something, most likely pissed-off users. I smell an opportunity..... Quick! Someone post some linux evangelism there!
Never mind that, what about people getting ultrasounds? Expectant mothers getting scanned would be all over the place. Once, when I tore the ligaments in my hand, they went over the area with an ultrasonic gadget that was seriously ultra - it was in the 2 to 3 MHz range.
Surely either of those would have excited or swept past the frequency that nerves allegedly transmit at?
He decries the added bells'n'whistles and the dollar-here, dollar-there system, then goes and points out that he's using a extra feature of the cellphone network... oh and for a price, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
*rolls eyes, sighs*
r bit-its-the-only-way-to-be-sure.
I-say-we-take-off-and-nuke-the-entire-site-from-o
Happy?
Why have lots of prank calls to emergency services when a keylock that's supposed to lock the keys - it's primary function - doesn't work?
As mentioned, pressing *any key on the phone* except zero gives a highly informative display of "press unlock", with a big animated arrow pointing to the unlock button, and then once you've pressed that, "press *".
If it's your phone, the odds that you will be dialing and you will know pretty well how to unlock said phone. If it's not your phone - to be honest, 10 seconds in getting emergency services doesn't count that much. In reality if the situation is that serious and you're the only one there, you should be busy giving first aid, ensuring someone's breathing, stopping bleeding or whatever, before you find the time to call emergency services. And if you're not alone, then the time you spend giving first aid more than compensates for the time it takes for another person with you to unlock an unfamiliar phone.
Or keylocks that don't quite lock all the keys.
My old Nokia 3310 has a keylock.... that lets you dial the emergency number through it.
The emergency number here is "000" - there were quite a few times where I'd pull my phone out of my pocket to be greeted with "000" and "send" all ready to go. Seeing that the send button's the biggest one on the phone, I'm amazed I didn't get more irate calls from emergency services. Any other key except 0 would give you the little animation of how to unlock the phone, so if there was an accident most people could figure it out, you'd think.
Here's a hint for the Nokia UI engineers: Keylocks should lock the keys. That is all. Don't add any unexpected overrides in there.
Fascinating.
...we get a hugely flexible system. A GSM phone from the UK may operate in Greece, but not for the same price as if you were sitting in London.
A few comments on the differences between here and there -
She can make calls from anywhere in the US, to anywhere in the US, for no additional charge.
Ditto here, sort of. That is, mobile to landline calls cost the same anywhere in Australia.
True, but that's more of an inter-country thing there and it actually showcases the flexibility of the GSM network in general. Do your phones play nicely with other countries when you're overseas?
We're crippled somewhat in Australia due to low population density and - well , low population in general. I drive on a weekly basis a trip that's 900km long one way (9 hours drive at the speed limit) - there would perhaps be 20,000 people , tops , that live along that route. Yet I can get coverage for 90% of the trip along it. That kind of coverage, with our kind of sparse population costs money.
This is the odd thing about the US mobile phone system that I can never figure out.
:-P. Now , that plan's a good rate for a user who makes a relatively small number of calls , but talks for a long time - tech support is a good fit for this plan. But there's a plethora of phone plans out there that all have the same basic tenet - your access to the network is (mostly) free, and you pay to make calls, and that's it.
Here, in Australia, there's no such thing as being charged to receive a call on your mobile. The caller pays the charges to connect to you, with all mobile numbers having an obvious prefix (04) that gives the caller an indication that this will cost them more than a normal PSTN call. So, I have a prepaid phone sim lying around here that has 12 months of access on it, and currently has $2 credit. People can call me that entire 12 months and it doesn't cost me anything.
For "normal" use, I have a phone plan for $35/mo that gives me untimed calls to any landline and Telstra mobile number in Australia for 35 cents, with other telco's mobiles the rate is 35c/min. I have my wife's phone on the same account with the same plan for her, and calls between us are free and untimed. Even, for some reason, 3G video calls, which I thought were supposed to be charged at the 35c/min rate..... but I'm not about to mention that to Telstra now
All this US business with "minutes" and crap just seems weird. Can someone explain it in detail for the foreigners?
Yeah, but the cost of shipping will be a bitch.
In extremely brief terms, Kant postulated that space and time, rather than being entities in their own right are characteristics of our 'minds,' (my oversimplification, not Kant's), and that the only way we can understand the universe is in spatiotemporal terms regardless of what the universe might actually be 'like'. In other words, it's conceivable that the universe is not spatio-temporal per-se--and if it's not, then physics cannot provide an exhaustive description of it.
:-(
Douglas Adams pops up again, it seems.
Whole Sort of General Mish-Mash
Ah, Doug, taken away from us too soon.
They need cheap metal or equivalent.
That would be plastic. Go have a look at the Reva sometime. Small electric car, mostly plastic panels over a minimal steel subframe. Whether it stands up to acceptable crashworthiness standards is anyones guess, however they are relatively low speed vehicles.
and there is some argument there that works but I can't express it well!
The words that you are looking for are, "Yadda yadda yadda."
They do, for people they care about.
Eugene Shoemaker wound up with some of his ashes on the Lunar Prospector spacecraft, which eventually flown into the moon. He was the guy who co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which eventually smacked into Jupiter.
See: Lunar spacecraft carries ashes, special tribute to Shoemaker
While I don't condone his actions in the past (that is, using /. to push more views to his site for personal gain), he doesn't link-through his site anymore. So now, he's just another submitter of crappy stories that generally give off wildly over-optimistic expectations of future possibilities.
It doesn't look *that* suspicious. It just looks like you haven't filled it yet. To maintain plausibility, the outer truecrypt layer will happily hose the hidden volume without warning if you fill the outer layer up.
You can just say, "yeah, I had a play around with TrueCrypt when I was feeling a little paranoid one day, but I never really use it."
I left that kind of crap 10 years ago.
I now have a job that :
- Does 12 hour shifts, with 4 days on, 4 days off, 4 nights on, 4 days off,etc.
- Six weeks a year of holidays. With the 4 days off every 4 days, I seriously have trouble using them all up.
- 5 days a year paid sick leave.
- Pays more than twice the national average (AUD105,000)
And the best part of it?
I go home after my shift, and no-one calls. Ever.
I laze about on my days off and I don't get asked to do overtime. Ever.
Why?
Because there is SOMEBODY ELSE TO DO THE WORK WHEN I'M NOT THERE.
It's the best part of the job. The simple pleasure of handing ongoing work off to another person so you can have a break is great. It might get handed back to you tommorrow, or when you come back 4 days later, but again, you get a break from it and the work gets passed along until it's finally complete.
Yes, yes, so you (not personally you, parent poster) are a big tough man and can hack it and the rest of them are pussies. Thing is, you don't need to. Get some decent conditions. Someone up further mentioned unions. This is where you need one - so you don't get exploited like this, and you are being exploited. Women seem to have it figured out. Just about every other industry figured it out nearly a century ago. How long will it be before people in IT realise it?
The IT industry really needs to sort its shit out.
We will always and only be in YOUR corner.
Sooooooo.... what happens when two companies pay the $10000+ to ReputationDefender and have opposing viewpoints?
RD salesman, to client #1: "Yes, that slanderous party are a tenacious bunch, aren't they? I can sign you up for our premium DefenderPack, it's another $20000.... but what's your reputation worth? You will? Ok, we'll start straight away and do our best."
RD salesman, to client #2: "Yes, that slanderous party are a tenacious bunch, aren't they? I can sign you up for our premium DefenderPack, it's another $20000.... but what's your reputation worth? You will? Ok, we'll start straight away and do our best."
RD salesman, to rest of team: "Is anyone actually doing anything for clients 1 and 2? No? Good. Keep it that way."
Good luck to them.
I'm not an encryption/stenography expert, so I have to trust others. But reading the description of TrueCrypt's hidden volume indicates that it's pretty hard to tell if anything's there without the key.
Free/slack space calculations are not an issue - the main volume will happily trash the hidden one if you overfill it. You can prevent this only if you know the passwords to both volumes.
A truecrypt volume allows you to have two layers, each one accessible via different passwords.
So, you give The Man the password to your tax return spreadsheet, letters to friends, etc.
Exactly.
In my car, I have a number of buttons and knobs, some on the dash, on the steering column, on the wheel itself. Each one can be operated without looking at it and each one does some specific function. Indeed, the most useful buttons on the stereo can be used even on the most potholed streets by putting your hand on the gearstick and using your index finger without drama.
But a display-that-changes-with-knob is a solution that is also a problem: The display changes, allowing more controls to occupy the same space. Good, for getting more functionality, bad for having to navigate through it all.
So, I want to access some function. I need to :
- Look at the screen and determine "where I am" in the menu system.
- I have to navigate to the selection I want, from where I was before. This may involve going up a few menu layers and then back down.
- Which takes a varying amount of rotation/clicks/whatever, depending on where I was. Each step generally requires visual confirmation that you're actually heading in the right direction to get where you want to be in the system.
Every time I do this, I am temporarily distracted from my main task, which is driving the car safely.
Reminds me of that old joke:
A guy gets invited to a hunting lodge one evening, and on his arrival, everyone is having a few beers and taking it easy. Suddenly, one of them stands up and says, "27". Everyone has a bit of a laugh and they clap appreciatively. Another person stands and says, "48." Again this is met with laughter and a few guffaws.
The visitor is perplexed and asks his host, "What's going on here?"
His host replies, "Oh, these guys have known each other for years, so long now that they know all their jokes. So, to save time , they numbered them."
"Oh!" the visitor says.
"Did you want to have a try at it?" says the host.
With much trepidation, the visitor stands up and says, "96."
Well, it brought the house down. Grizzled old men are rolling about, clutching their sides laughing, gasping for breath. This goes on for nearly ten minutes.
"Wow! They really liked that one!" says the visitor.
"I'll say!" said the host, wiping a tear from his eye, "They hadn't heard that one before!"
But I am in HISTERICAL URGE to get one... $300 is really cheap for a PC with STUNNING FORM/FACTOR.......So actually I'am quite MOIST thinking about this hardware.
madlibs, is that you?
Unless you can assure that there are no vapors (very difficult in practice), you run the risk of lighting the gas (and yourself) on fire. Don't do it.
Actually, you need as much vapor as possible - it displaces the air (and oxygen) leaving you with a non-combustible mix. For petrol-air concentrations below 1.4%, the mixture is too lean to ignite, and for those above 7.6% too rich; at all concentrations between these two limits, a mixture of petrol vapour and air will burn.
As far as I know, Slashdot had avoided this particular type of adword blog post crap until now.
Two words:
Roland Piquepaille.
There's 119 posts on that thread. It's a trail of something, most likely pissed-off users.
I smell an opportunity..... Quick! Someone post some linux evangelism there!
Never mind that, what about people getting ultrasounds? Expectant mothers getting scanned would be all over the place.
Once, when I tore the ligaments in my hand, they went over the area with an ultrasonic gadget that was seriously ultra - it was in the 2 to 3 MHz range.
Surely either of those would have excited or swept past the frequency that nerves allegedly transmit at?
It just struck me as a little bit incongruous.
He decries the added bells'n'whistles and the dollar-here, dollar-there system, then goes and points out that he's using a extra feature of the cellphone network... oh and for a price, of course.
I use my phone to call people... sorry, I don't buy into all of the extra "services" designed to get me at $0.10 here and $1.00 there....
:) $49 unlimited 3G access...
next post.....
Oh, BTW I am posting this using my Cingular data card
*head explodes*